Founded in 1990 by Alan Caruba, a business and science writer, the Center is a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" designed to influence public opinion and policies. Read Caruba's daily commentaries at "Warning Signs" (see favorite sites)
Email acaruba@aol.com or acaruba1321@gmail.com.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Unlike
previous gatherings of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, the 18th one occurring in Doha, Qatar between
November 26 and December 7 is likely to shun media coverage of their schemes to
enrich participants who want massive transfers of money from developed to
undeveloped nations. Thieves work best in the dark.

These
are the folks who came up with the Kyoto Protocols that were intended to reduce
“greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), in order to save the
Earth from becoming a crispy desert as the result of global warming. Adopted on
December 11, 1997, the protocols set “binding targets for 37 industrialized
nations and the European community with the goal of reducing 1990 levels of CO2
over a five-year period 2008 to 2012." Two major emitters, China and India, were
exempted from the Protocols, thus rendering it even more idiotic than it already
was.

The
UN explained this, saying “Recognizing that developed countries are principally
responsible for the current high levels of GHG emissions in the atmosphere as a
result of more than 150 years of industrial activity, the Protocol places a
heavier burden on developed nations under the principle of 'common but
differentiated responsibilities.'” In other words, developed nations have more
money and any “industrial activity” must be punished for causing “global
warming.”

The
problem for the Protocols was that the United States Senate unanimously rejected
to signing on to this hoax. Then, in 2009, the exposure of emails between the
“scientists” responsible for the data the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) was putting out to scare the pants off of everyone about “global
warming”—since dubbed Climategate—revealed they were not only rigging the
computer models, but were increasingly worried that the planet had entered a
new, perfectly natural, cooling cycle.

It is worth noting that, in 2011, Canada, Japan and Russia announced
they would not take on further Kyoto targets.The Canadian government invoked Canada's legal right to formally
withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on December 12 2011. Having initially committed
to cutting its greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, Environment
Minister Peter Kent had earlier cited Canada's liability to "enormous financial
penalties" under the treaty unless it withdrew. Smart people those Canadians,
leading the way for Japan and Russia to depart as well.

The
Kyoto Protocols were an international deception perpetrated by the UN. The Earth
has been cooling for the past sixteen
years.
Carbon Dioxide has nothing—zero—to do with the planet’s temperature and all
warming comes from the Sun.

Even
so, representatives to COP 18 are gathering to create a “Green Climate Fund” for
the same purpose that existed in 1997.

Not
long ago Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, was interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert of Yale
Environment 360, and it appeared in the Nov 21 edition of The
Guardian,
a British newspaper. She babbled on about “the inevitability of world economies
making the transition to a low-carbon future” and “the need for politicians to
feel the same urgency as climate scientists about the threats posed by global
warming.”

As
we have seen, there are bad climate scientists who rig the computer models
representing a huge rise in the Earth’s overall average temperature and there
are good climate scientists who have waged a long and increasingly successful
effort to debunk the greatest hoax of the modern era. The bad ones profit from
the grants and other financial support they receive. They good ones are defamed
as “skeptics” and “deniers.”

In
1992, Al Gore launched his global warming career and road to riches with a book,
“Earth in the Balance.” Among his more insane recommendations was the
elimination of the internal combustion engine within twenty-five years. Those
engines can be found under the hood of the millions of cars that are a very
popular form of transportation.

Ron
Arnold, Executive Vice President of the Center for the Defense of Free
Enterprise, recently cited a report by the Virginia-based Science
and PublicPolicy Institute—a
leading opponent of global warming—regarding the complete futility of any effort
by the U.S. to reduce CO2 emissions. Its author, Paul Knappenberg, based his
assumptions on an IPCC report spelling out a scenario in which “the U.S. as a
whole stopped emitting all carbon dioxide emissions immediately.” He found that
“the ultimate impact on projected global temperature rise would be a reduction
or a ‘savings’ of approximately 0.08 degrees Centigrade by the year 2050 and
0.17 degrees Centigrade by the year 2100”; results that would be negligible.

Arnold
noted that “not only do the rest of the world’s new emissions completely replace
ours in just 6.6 years, but China’s growth alone replaces them in less than 11
years.

If
you want to know about the Earth’s “balance” than it is useful to know that the
release of carbon dioxide comes in part from its several hundred active
volcanoes, from forest fires, and from the many animals, including humans, who
exhale it. Without CO2, every tree, every blade of grass, and all the crops of
the Earth would die and, shortly thereafter, all human and animal life would die
as well. The Earth balances CO2 emissions with carbon sinks that absorb and
release it as they have done for much of its 4.5 billion years of
existence.

If
there was any truth to the claim that CO2 is heating the Earth, one would have
to ignore all of its previous ice ages that were followed by natural warming
periods, including the most recent mini-ice age from about 1300 to
1850.

In
addition to COP 18, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to unleash
an avalanche of new regulations all aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by
everything from utilities to major industries, as well as smaller ones such as
your local bakery. The “science” the EPA cites is totally bogus. It will close
many of the coal-fired utilities that produce the bulk of the nation’s
electricity. Inside of a decade the EPA may put them all out of
business.

There
are vast forces, all masquerading as “saving the Earth”, at the international
and national level that are seeking to wreck all the technological advances the
people of the Earth take for granted and the citizens of the United States need
to survive. That’s all you really need to know about COP 18 and the EPA.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

If my emails and the headlines I am
reading indicate anything, there is widespread fear among Americans that
something terrible has occurred with the reelection of President Obama. Not all
Americans, though. Those who voted for Obama appear to remain oblivious despite
the threat of a “fiscal cliff” or the new taxes in Obamacare that will kick in
on January 2nd.

We have a Secretary of the Treasury,
Timothy, Geithner, calling for an end to debt ceilings, apparently believing
that America can continue to borrow money to pay for the interest on its
escalating debt, now pegged at $16 trillion and growing daily. The U.S. borrows
$4 billion a day. Anyone with a credit card knows that their payments increase
as they struggle to deal with their personal debt. Eventually they either
declare bankruptcy or turn to companies that negotiate a payment to release
them.

If America was to default on its
debt, the dollar, already in free fall, would be worth nothing. We would be
bartering shiny beads and anything else to buy food and other necessaries. We
would become Zimbabwe where you need a million of their dollars to buy a loaf of
bread.

Writing
recently on her Fox Business blog, Gerri Willis spelled out the huge rise in
taxes Americans are facing. “All
told, next year, total taxes will go to almost 50% for the middle class; the
very group that the president says he wants to protect. That means 50 cents out
of every dollar earned has to go to the government. Half of everything will go
to an entity that didn't earn that money, and shouldn't be entitled to all that
dough.”

What kind of madness is it that the
Teamsters union would impose such senseless rules that it would weaken Hostess
to the point of bankruptcy, preferring to let the company die rather than to
protect the jobs of 18,500 bakers? Other unions are engaged in attacks on a
weakened economy. What kind of nation is it that its government employees are
lobbying Congress to not only increase their pay, but to exempt them from the
impact of the spending cuts scheduled to kick in?

There is a full-scale attack on the
privacy Americans have taken for granted, protected by the fourth Amendment that
says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated…”

On November 14th, the Heritage Foundation asked “Do
you trust the government with your computer?” The government has had “13
breaches and failures of its own cybersecurity just in the last six
months.”Even so, “the President and his
allies in the Senate are pushing forward to regulate America’s cyber-doings,
without any clues about how much this will cost or how it will
work.”

“It has become the norm with this
President—if Congress fails to accomplish his objectives, he goes around it with
executive orders and federal regulations. He’s doing it again. Congress did not
pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 before the election, so the President has
issued a draft of an executive order to put much of that legislation in place
without lawmakers voting.”

This is the very essence of tyranny
and the President has had four years to perfect it. Are conservative think tanks
the only ones paying any attention? It would appear so.

A new proposed law in the Senate
would strip Americans of any privacy as they communicate with one another by
email. A vote for the law would allow warrantless access to American’s email
and is scheduled for a vote shortly. It would allow 22 federal agencies as well
as state and local law enforcement to access one’s emails with nothing more than
a subpoena. This is totally unconstitutional.

Already $16 trillion in debt, the
government is looking for ways to take over the $3 trillion that is held in
private retirement plans such as 401(k) plans and IRA’s. A recent hearing by the
Treasury and Labor Departments addressed the nationalization of the nation’s
pension system. The director of the National Senior’s Council, Robert Crone,
warns “It is clear that this is the first step towards a government takeover. It
feels just like the beginning of the debate over health care and we all know how
that ended up.”

As we move closer to an Electoral
College vote confirming Obama’s reelection, whistleblowers are coming forth in
Ohio, Florida and elsewhere to reveal that significant voter fraud was a
contributing factor, but it receives little or no media coverage. One must ask
how 99% of votes in Philadelphia districts went to Obama and ask why nothing is
being done to investigate this and other offenses such as the reported 141.1% of the vote
recorded in Florida’s St. Lucie County. That is statistically impossible, but it
robbed Rep. Allen West (R) of his seat in Congress.

This isn’t government. It is
gangsterism. It is “the Chicago way.”

The monster Homeland Security Agency
just graduated its first class of FEMA Corps, kids aged 18-24, recruited from
the President’s Americorps volunteers, that will become a full time, paid
standing army. Fears of FEMA camps abound and in the aftermath of Hurricane
Sandy, people seeking shelter and food were herded into one that resembled a
concentration camp of the Nazi regime and told not to use various means of
communication to contact the media or outside community. They went from
hurricane victims to prisoners of the government.

In so many ways, the freedoms
protected by the U.S. Constitution are in danger of disappearing along with the
separation of powers it requires.

Little wonder that citizen’s
petitions from a growing number of states are called for secession. Or that
governors are refusing to set up the Obamacare exchanges required by a law that
has taken control of twenty percent of the nation’s economy; their budgets held
hostage to Medicaid.

On an individual level, people who
have jobs are fearful of losing them. College graduates are fearful of the huge
debt they carry for the loans they received. People wonder if they can afford to
get married. Married couples fear the cost of having another child. Homeowners
fear not being able to pay their mortgages. Seniors fear that their savings
won’t last as they live longer.

There is ample reason to fear not
only the collapse of the nation’s economy, but the loss of liberty in
America.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

At his recent press conference,
President Obama, in response to a question, said “You know, as you know, Mark,
we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change. What we do
know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted
even ten years ago.” That is a flat out lie. The temperature of the Earth has
been cooling for at least sixteen years.

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy
wrought defies the imagination, particularly for those on the East Coast where
so much destruction was inflicted. It mirrored 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and it
is only natural for people to believe there has been an increase in hurricanes
striking the U.S. homeland, but there hasn’t.

Despite 2009’s “Climategate” that
revealed that global warming is a hoax, many still believe it exists. In a
letter to Fred Upton, the Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce
on November 11th,
meteorologists and climatologists joined to warn that “Global warming that has
not actually occurred can scarcely have contributed much to vast destruction
wrought by Sandy.”

Dr. Bill Gray, the nation’s expert on
hurricanes, was joined by Dr. Willie Soon, Prof. Fred Singer, and Lord
Christopher Monckton, a science advisor to Britain’s former Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, to say that “Hurricane Sandy was a freak storm, not the type
of extreme weather event that climate scientists have said will become more
frequent and more severe if we fail to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide.”

“After almost 16
years without global warming, there are still a few who implausibly try to
blame this non-existent global warming for causing various weather-related
disasters in the past two or three years.” The letter advised against holding
hearings on the recent hurricane. “With the election behind us, we will have an
opportunity to begin again and give this matter the attention it deserves—none
at all.”

Writing in Forbes
magazine, James Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s editor of Environment and
Climate News, spelled out the actual record of hurricane activity in the decades
prior to the global warming hoax which began in the late 1980s and
since.

“The National Hurricane Center (NHC)
provides information on major U.S. hurricanes during the past 100-plus years.
According to the NHC, 70 major hurricanes struck the United States in the 100
years between 1911 and 2010. That is an average of seven major hurricane strikes
per decade.”

In all the decades back to 1961, the
100-year average remained intact with major hurricanes ranging from as few per
decade as four and as many as seven. Not a single decade varied from
this.

In the decades since the 1980s when
alarmists began warning of a major increase in the overall temperature of the
Earth, claiming it would trigger major weather events like hurricanes, nothing
changed. In the decades in which carbon dioxide emissions were said to be the
cause, the average remained the same.

Taylor examined the preceding 50
years before “the alleged human-induced global warming crisis.” He spelled out
the data from 1951 to 1920 that reveals that the 100-year average was unchanged.

Despite the global warming claims
“during the past four decades, the time period during which global warming
alarmists claim human-induced global warming accelerated rapidly and became
incontrovertible, the fewest number of major hurricanes struck during any
40-year period since at least the 1800s.”

In the first two years of this
current decade “exactly zero major hurricanes struck the United
States.”

Despite this, the calls for carbon
taxes are being heard; taxes that would affect all industry and businesses
nationwide. Such a tax, already in place in California, would drive large scale
manufacturing out of the nation and take with them hundreds of thousands of
jobs. It would impact the nation’s utilities and drive up the cost of
electricity, the life blood of the nation.

If Americans do not wake up to this
threat, do not realize that hurricane activity has not increased, and realize,
too, that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, they will fall
victim to the vast matrix of environmental organizations, government agencies,
and the mainstream media that continues to spread alarm in the name of global
warming and climate change.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

News
releases trumpeting not merely inaccurate, but false, science have become a way
of life for Americans and others around the world. There is rarely, if ever, any
fact checking done by the editors and reporters who pass along often dangerously
false science on a wide range of topics, with many reports designed to alarm
consumers.

Such
is the case with bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that has been in use for some 60
years to protect the contents of metal food containers and create shatter
resistant plastics. In 2011 I wrote a four-part
series about the efforts to ban BPA which has been subjected to more
than 5,000 studies, none of which has found harm or undue risk in normal use.
Its safety was reaffirmed earlier this year by the refusal of the Food and Drug
Administration to ban it.

But
the anti-chemical drumbeat continues. A recent study at the University of
California-San Diego that purported to show a risk of danger when BPA was
metabolized and this finding was announced by a news release issued by the
university. It was reviewed and approved by researcher Michael Baker and
contained the traditional hype we see when organizations want to whip up public
concern when none is warranted. Remarkably, the tactic was exposed in a lengthy
article by Jon Entine in Forbes magazine.

News
releases trumpeting information that is not merely inaccurate but false have
become a way of life for Americans and others around the world. There is rarely,
if ever, any fact checking done by the editors and reporters who pass along
often dangerously false pseudo-science on a wide range of topics, from chemicals
to the climate. But Entine’s article revealed something many has suspected but
few have ever admitted.

Baker
confessed to Entine that “I have no evidence, none at all, that BPA causes any
problems in humans. This was a theoretical exercise, and it would be trumped by
what actually happens in the real world. Based on what I know now, neither BPA
nor its metabolites are harmful. I am upset that my structural study is misused
by some.”

“Misused”?
Hardly. More like part of the massive effort by the opponents of the real
science regarding BPA and it is designed and intended to frighten people because
fear is the most potent weapon that the many advocates of false causes that mask
themselves as saving lives or even saving the Earth.

Writing
in the National Review, Julie Gunlock noted that
reports on Baker’s study, read by those without knowledge of the real facts
about BPA, “causes moms like me to gnaw off their fingernails at the thought
that we might be poisoning our children with chemicals. But that’s okay; regular
moms and dads (already struggling with high food and fuel costs) can just run
out and support the cottage industry that has sprouted up in the wake of these
terrifying headlines—the BPA-free industry.”

“Of
course, what parents won’t hear about is Baker’s mea culpa because if there’s
one thing parents can count on from today’s science writers is an absolute
dearth of Entine-esque journalism when it comes to BPA.” She could not be more
correct.

Science
writing today is one of the most debased forms of popular journalism found in
newspapers and magazines and BPA is just one example. Consider our food supply.
A recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Henry I.
Miller, a physician, molecular biologist and fellow at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution, cited the way Greenpeace, one of the leading environmental
organizations, “has always had a flair for publicity” to become “a $260
million-plus per year behemoth with offices in more than 40
countries.”

Dr.
Miller warns that the Greenpeace PR machine “is now spearheading an effort to
deny the poorest nations the essential nutrients they need to stave off
blindness and death. The targets are new plant varieties collectively called
‘golden rice.’ Rice is a food staple for hundreds of millions, especially in
Asia. Although it is an excellent source of calories, it lakes certain nutrients
necessary for a complete diet. In the 1980s and 1990s, German scientists Ingo
Potrykus and Peter Beyer developed the ‘golden rice’ varieties that are
biofortified, or enriched, by genes that produce beta-carotine, the precursor of
vitamin A.”

Hundreds
of millions of children of pre-school age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency,
leading to blindness and death within a year for about 70% of those children and
Greenpeace is using its multi-million dollar flacking apparatus to ply its
nonsense to a gullible and uncritical news media and reduce access to this
valuable food source.

Now
ask yourself how many children and adults would die from botulism in unprotected
cans and bottles of food?

These
and countless other examples represent the deep commitment of environmental
organizations to limit and reduce billions of human lives which they regard as a
nuisance that harms the Earth. Like golden rice, BPA saves lives. It is just one
of countless chemicals that protect and extends life every day.

The
real threat is the researchers and agenda-driven scientists intent on advancing
the environmental movement’s objective of killing as many people as possible to
“save the Earth.” They accomplish this through a media that either approves of
this agenda or is just so starved for ratings and financial survival they’ll
report any sensational headline available. The real threat is the debased
“science journalism” that aids and advances this agenda.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.